What does "performant" software actually mean?

Posted by Roddy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Roddy
Published on 2010-01-21T20:44:22Z Indexed on 2010/06/02 19:44 UTC
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Performance

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terminology

I see it used a lot, but haven't seen a definition that makes complete sense.

Wiktionary says "characterized by an adequate or excellent level of performance or efficiency", which isn't much help.

Initially I though performant just meant "fast", but others seem to think it's also about stability, code quality, memory use/footprint, or some combination of all those.

I think this is a "real" question - but if enough people reckon this is a subjective question, that's an answer in itself.

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